When Asustek’s Asus Eee PC was announced last month, it seemed to be geared toward Linux. But Asustek will now offer Windows as a choice and this choice may actually become the dominant platform for the low-cost PC. So speculates the independent blog, Asus EEE Hacks. Asus Eee is essentially an Intel Classmate PC, a rugged notebook computer designed to withstand the abuse of being used by children. Intel’s Classmate is particularly geared toward emerging markets, competing with the One Laptop Per Child project. (Aside: The One Laptop Per Child made news for its supposedly $100 laptop that would be sold in r developing countries. The XO laptop actually cost about $200. The organization is doing something rather cool though. It is offering a holiday program in which people can pay $399 for two laptops where one XO goes the child of your choice (like your own kid) and one is donated to a child in a developing country.)
As for the the value of Microsoft on the Asus Eee, the Asus EEE Hacks blog says:
Apparently Microsoft must have sensed something in the Asus Eee PC as they agreed to lower their licensing fee to $40 to make the bundling more feasible. And while the Asus Eee PC website did not mention Windows XP in particular, there is much reason to believe the Windows version that will bundled will be XP. After all, the Asus Eee PC is an Intel Classmate PC. And Intel has, for some time now, been shipping Classmate PCs with 256MB RAM and 2GB flash drive and especially configured Windows XP/MS Office 2003 pre-installed … The people I have not been able to visualize using a Wintel PC somehow I can bring myself to imagine them using the Asus Eee PC, all because of the Easy Mode menu. It is so easy to teach them to click this to do this, click that to do that.
The Asus Eee – and others like it priced at under $400, could be an answer to the competition of the low-end Linux machines starting to emerge, such as the $199 Everex Green gPC TC2502.
